The nomination of a former environment minister by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as his party’s İstanbul mayoral candidate for the local elections on March 31 has brought the results of four recent public surveys to the public agenda, with all of them showing the city’s incumbent opposition mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu winning again.
Erdoğan on Sunday announced the nomination of former environment minister and current Justice and Development Party (AKP) lawmaker Murat Kurum as his party’s mayoral candidate to win back İstanbul from main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) mayor İmamoğlu.
The CHP seized control of İstanbul for the first time since Erdoğan ruled the city as mayor in the 1990s in watershed 2019 polls, which many say was the worst political defeat Erdoğan has suffered in his political career.
According to the results of a public survey conducted by Metropoll in December, İmamoğlu receives the 48.2 percent of the vote, while Kurum’s vote stands at 33.9 percent.
İmamoğlu was supported by Kurdish voters as well as nationalist İYİ (Good) Party voters in the 2019 elections. It is not yet clear whether he will be able to garner the support of these voters again as the opposition parties are no longer unified and harbor resentments over their past alliances. These parties are also planning to field their own candidates.
Despite the problems, 84.2 percent of İYİ Party supporters and 75 percent of pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) supporters said they would vote for İmamoğlu in the İstanbul election, according to Metropoll.
When another public survey company, Sonar, asked respondents in a survey also conducted in December who they would like to see as İstanbul’s next mayor, 31 percent named İmamoğlu, while only 6.7 percent said they would like to see Kurum as the city’s next mayor.
The 47-year-old Kurum studied civil engineering at Selçuk University in Turkey’s conservative heartland of Konya. He worked in the private sector until 2005 following his graduation in 1999. Kurum was recruited by Turkey’s state-run housing authority, TOKİ, in 2005 where he served in various positions. From 2009 to 2018, when he was first appointed minister of environment, he held senior positions at Emlak Konut GYO, a Turkish real estate developer belonging to TOKI.
The same survey showed İmamoğlu’s familiarity rating at 93.7 percent, while Kurum’s stood at 67.8 percent.
Another survey conducted by the Optimar polling company in November showed İmamoğlu’s support at 48.8 percent and Kurum’s at 30.2 percent.
İmamoğlu is viewed as Erdoğan’s most powerful political rival. His name was among the possible presidential candidates for the general election held in May in which Erdoğan secured another term against former CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in a runoff. The popular mayor faces a political ban and a jail sentence, if upheld by the top appeals court, on insult charges due to his remarks about election authority officials in 2019 as a result of a politically charged trial.
The fourth survey showing İmamoğlu winning against the AKP’s or the candidate to be nominated by the Public Alliance, an alliance of parties including the AKP, the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and several other small parties, was recently conducted by the ORC company. The survey showed İmamoğlu getting 40.8 percent of the vote against the mayoral candidate of the Public Alliance who was not revealed at the time and who would receive 40.2 percent of the vote.
Nineteen percent of participants in the ORC survey were undecided.
Turkish media reported that Kurum, a native of Ankara, came out on top of an internal party poll Erdoğan oversaw last month.
İmamoğlu edged out Erdoğan’s ally, Binali Yıldırım, in the 2019 election that gained international headlines for being controversially annulled.
İmamoğlu won a re-run vote by a massive margin that turned him into an instant hero for the opposition and a formidable foe for Erdoğan.
The 52-year-old is widely seen as the opposition’s best bet for winning back the presidency from Erdoğan’s AKP in 2028.